A star for every occasion

Mark Fainaru-Wada, OF THE EXAMINER STAFF

Published 4:00 am, Wednesday, January 14, 1998

STANFORD - For nearly two months now, as his basketball team has won game after game, creeping its way up the national rankings to its current spot at No. 7, Mike Montgomery has grabbed hold of and wrung every last drop from this basic platitude: "We are what we are."

In trying to explain his team's success, Montgomery, the head coach of Stanford's 14-0 men's squad, has mentioned things like help defense, depth, point of impact, focus, motion offense - a mishmash of basketball terms and concepts that, ultimately, could be summed up by his shopworn phrase.

But, really, how and why is Stanford undefeated, inches away from cracking the top five and a legitimate threat to win the Pac-10 title?

"We're playing great team ball," said junior guard Kris Weems, whose 13.9 points per game lead the Cardinal.

In itself, "team ball" can be a trite notion, but it doesn't ring hollow at Stanford, where the Cardinal are building a season on selflessness. USC and UCLA come to town this week, and what the L.A. schools are bound to find when they hit Maples Pavilion is that the difficulty in stopping Stanford lies in figuring out whom to stop.

These aren't the Cardinal of last year, when it was Brevin Knight and his merry band of helpers - a one-man show with a solid cast of ancillary types who were elevated by Knight's star quality.

Now, Stanford is five guys averaging barely more than half a game's worth of playing time, and another six who seemingly could be called on / relied upon at just about any point. And there almost certainly would be a seventh reliable reserve were it not for a knee injury to freshman center Jason Collins, who has played in only one game but is expected back in uniform this week.

"I think it's good we don't have a go-to guy," said junior forward Peter Sauer, who is averaging 9.4 points and 5.2 rebounds a game. "No one goes, "If I don't get 15 rebounds or if I don't shoot well, we're done.' "

And that's basically been true. For if it hasn't been one Cardinal, it has been another. Six players have led the team in scoring in the 14 games to date, and while Weems has emerged lately as a go-to shooter, there's hardly the sense that he's The Man.

Really, just about anybody can be - and has been - The Man, from Weems hitting for 34 at Oregon State to Mark Madsen (currently injured) scoring 23 against Georgia; from Tim Young with a clutch basket to silence a Rhode Island run to Ryan Mendez off the bench for a pair of timely 3-pointers against Cal; from Arthur Lee's 15 points and eight assists against Butler to reserve David Moseley's microwave night against Santa Barbara.

The reality of this Stanford team is that there are probably seven players who could go for 20 points on any given night, and, as Cal coach Ben Braun said after the Cardinal's 84-74 victory last week, Stanford is a "very good blend" of inside and outside scoring.

If you try to take away one, you're bound to get punished by the other. For example, in that Cal game, after Young scored six points in the first seven minutes and had three other good looks, the Bears finally tried to double-down on the Stanford center after he took a pass from Lee. Young calmly tossed the ball back to Lee, who nailed a 3-pointer.

"It's very difficult (to defend us)," said Lee, whose 11.1 points-per-game average makes him one of four Stanford players averaging in double digits. "Opponents sometimes feel they have to focus on certain players. Like against Oregon, maybe they focused on our inside players, and Kris just torched 'em and (Moseley) came off the bench and he was on fire.